1. Technical Field
The present disclosure relates generally to location-based services, and more specifically to geo-fences.
2. Background Information
Location-based services are a field of mobile applications that leverage the ability of many mobile devices to determine their current location and perform actions based on that location. Location-based services may involve supplying location-dependent content (e.g., advertisements, weather forecasts, driving directions, traffic updates, or other content) on the mobile device itself, providing location information for the mobile device to other devices (e.g., to enable “buddy” finding, child monitoring, or other services), collecting location-based statistical information (e.g., consumer demographic data, traffic data, or other data), or other types of operations.
Some location-based services utilize geo-fences. A geo-fence is a virtual perimeter that may be established around a real-world geographic area. Crossing a geo-fence may cause a service to be provided, cause a service to be withheld, or trigger some other sort of action, depending on the particular application. However, there are several shortcomings in the present implementation of geo-fences on many mobile devices. Two prominent shortcomings involve limits on the number of geo-fences that a mobile device may concurrently monitor, and restrictions on the shape and/or size of geo-fences that the mobile device may monitor.
In order to support geo-fences, mobile devices typically repeatedly determine their current location and compare that location to the virtual perimeter defined by the geo-fence. Such location determination and comparison consumes resources of the mobile device, including processing resources, and, often more importantly, power resources. Given the importance of battery life for many mobile devices, there may be practical limits on how many geo-fences can be concurrently monitored. In some cases, these practical limits are codified into restrictions imposed by the mobile device's operating system or firmware. For example, some mobile devices currently allow concurrent monitoring of about 20 geo-fences for a given application and about 100 geo-fences across all applications. These geo-fence limits are becoming increasingly problematic, as geo-fences are being utilized in more and more location based services. However, increasing these limits has proven difficult, given the compelling desire to even further reduce power consumption of mobile devices.
Further, in order to simplify processing and achieve other efficiencies, some mobile devices impose limits on the possible shapes and sizes of monitored geo-fences. While geo-fences may theoretically be defined to have any of a wide variety of shapes and sizes, some mobile devices only support monitoring of geo-fences having certain supported shapes and sizes. For example, a mobile device may only support circular-shaped geo-fences having a radius of 100 meters. This limitation is becoming increasingly burdensome on developers and users, who may desire to utilize geo-fences having shapes and/or sizes other than those natively supported.
Accordingly, there is a needed for improved techniques that may allow for monitoring of a number of geo-fences beyond a mobile device's geo-fence limit, and for using geo-fences of shapes and/or sizes other than those natively support by the mobile device.